The Watering Hole; Thursday September 15 2016; That “Basket of Deplorables”: Take A Closer Look

Last Friday evening (September 9), Hillary Clinton accurately described Trump’s campaign supporters in rather near poetic fashion when she said, to applause and laughter, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

A few nanoseconds later, the shit was in the fan. The media, Trump, the Trump campaign surrogates, Trump supporters (and probably even Vladimir Putin) all came together in a cumulative “deplorable” lambast. Clinton later walked the comments back a notch when she suggested that she shouldn’t have used the word “half” because it might not have been precisely accurate, but doing so didn’t buy her much relief from the faux outrage. And while it’s undoubtedly true that the word “half” — i.e. exactly 50% — is clearly not definitively posited by national (statistically precise) polling data, . . . well, suffice to say that even though it was grossly generalistic, it probably wasn’t really THAT far off.

So I decided to look into it. First, the pot calls the kettle black when Trump announces that “Hillary Clinton still hasn’t apologized to those she slanders.” Trump hasn’t either, of course, but that moot little point is apparently of no consequence, given that Donald Trump Wasted No Time in Defending His ‘Basket Of Deplorables.’ Not a big surprise, really. “Deplorables” are like that. Usually.

Next up, a “brief” peek at a fair number of current “revelations” that a fair number of Trump’s well known and familiar vocalizers have revealed, revelations that do, indeed, drop them into that “deplorable” trap — and for a far wider variety of reasons than just those noted by Hillary. In most cases, the titles speak for themselves; underneath some, however, are my own brief comments, while underneath others are quotes from inside the linked article itself that demonstrate the deplorable nature of . . . etc. But all together, the point is clarified and driven home as if by spikes driven through one’s hand and into a wooden cross: Hillary’s grossly generalistic hypothesis was damn close to being spot-on correct.

“Maybe it’s not the End of History after all, Shalom. And maybe America will follow the leader of every other European nation in history in eventually awakening from the Jewish spell and driving y’all out. Whether Trump turns out to be the man who rises up from among the people to drive you out of power, what’s been demonstrated is that our human nature hasn’t been fundamentally transformed. White Americans are actually reviving their spirit of racial pride, bucking the Jewish plan for them, and growing immune to the usual enticements and enforcements.”

The only thing more ironic than Donald Trump complaining about Hillary Clinton’s criticism of the “deplorables” who support his candidacy is Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council pointing to her comments as proof that liberals are mean-spirited and “narrow-minded.” Perkins, who was speaking on Fox Business News, even hinted about Clinton possibly imprisoning her opponents.

“After 9/11, we’ve allowed in 2 million Muslims into the United States, many of whom don’t embrace American ideals, they continue to embrace Islamic Sharia law ideals, and they intend to foist them on the rest of us in the United States. They don’t understand what it means to become an American and to embrace American values because Islamic Sharia laws are antithetical to American values. This is something that Donald Trump gets. He gets the border, he gets American values, he’s not ashamed to stand for American values and he’s willing to call out the haters that hate the United States of America. We are so blessed that we have this man as our candidate this time around.”

On a recent episode of his radio show, avid Trump supporter David Duke and his co-host Jay Hess expressed some of their concerns about a Hillary Clinton presidency. Very serious concerns, of course, that she may want to genocide all the white people.

According to Duke and Hess, Clinton is a race traitor who does not care that white people are being “outbred,” which is their primary fear as it relates to immigrants coming to America. . . .

Duke says: “When a person goes to the store, they go to the mall, or they drive somewhere in their car and they break down, or they stop at a traffic light and they might get hijacked, nine times out of ten it’s not gonna be some white guy hijacking their car. It’s not gonna be a white guy kidnapping them at the Walmart, right? And, you know, taking their family and slaughtering them, or robbing them or raping the women. That’s just the reality of life in this country.”

Bevin recounted a story from his college days about how he confronted a professor who he said mocked Christianity, the way liberals always do: “They try to silence us. They try to get us to shut our mouths. They try to embarrass us. Don’t be embarrassed. We were not redeemed to have a spirit of timidity.” He urged young people, “Be bold. There’s enough Neville Chamberlains in the world. Be a Winston Churchill…There are quite enough sheep already. Be a shepherd.”
(. . .)
“Somebody asked me yesterday, I did an interview and they said, “Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive? That we would ever be able to recover as a nation? And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ. But I will tell you this: I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away.”

“The days of public funding for Planned Parenthood are over when a Trump-Pence administration arrives in Washington, D.C.,” he said, referring to Trump’s proposal to veto any funding for Planned Parenthood unless the group vows to do away with its abortion services.

Hillary Clinton’s comments over the weekend about the “deplorables” who support Donald Trump have resulted in some deliciously ironic criticism from Trump and some of his supporters. Among the Trump supporters slamming Clinton was Robert Jeffress, a pastor with a long record of anti-gay, anti-Mormon and anti-Catholic rhetoric, who accused Clinton of “hate speech” and “intolerance.”

“I tell you, it reveals the hypocrisy of liberalism, and that is liberals who cry loudest for tolerance are usually the most intolerant people in the world when it comes to ideas with which they disagree,” Jeffress told conservative radio host Mike Gallagher today. “I mean, think about it, according to Clinton you’re a racist if you believe in secure borders, you’re xenophobic if you believe people ought to only be in this country legally and you’re homophobic if you believe in traditional marriage. The fact is, Hillary Clinton is exhibit A of intolerance and her comments Friday were nothing but hate speech.”

And here are four more — enlightening (and obliterating) links to those “deplorables” — i.e. ‘revelations’ that Trump sees as “real Americans,” but which anyone with a functioning brain sees as “deplorables,” aka those whose irrational hate and fear know no Bounds: Trump supporters thereby defined, i.o.w.

OK, so yes, I know that’s not all twenty million (or whatever the number) links to that grossly generalistic . . . half of Trump’s supporters aka the basket of deplorables that are out there running free, but it’s a collection that probably represents most of them in one way or another.

Fortunately for the sane remaining among us, however, a handful of voices have emerged from the Trumpissta cacophony of outrage, and have actually begun to clarify the realities that those of sound mind have recognized since the word “deplorables” first made media contact. Here are three of them (rather amazing, when you think of it) that are willing to hint that there was a substantial current of truth and reality embedded in HRC’s remarks:

When Hillary Clinton claims that half of Trump’s supporters qualify as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” data is on her side.

And here is a further pair of journalistic summations that clearly do NOT confirm a sizeable error in HRC’s “half of Trump’s supporters” [are] “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it” statement, but instead point out that she pretty much hit the nail on the head (sotospeak). First, from Charles Pierce:

“We graded Republicans on a intellectual curve when they embraced a fundamentalist splinter of American Protestantism and brought themselves to a pass in which they are the 21st Century Know Nothings. They have followed movement conservatism to the point where they can ignore science and promote creationism and supply side economic foolishness simply because they can sell it to the same audiences that gobble up the red meat that’s been marinating since George Wallace ran for president. Because they are graded on a curve, they can still claim to be shocked when the purist product of all of that work hijacks the nomination and gives the entire game away. Of course, Trump has been graded on a curve. If the electorate hadn’t graded modern conservatism on an intellectual curve, it would’ve flunked out of Human College decades ago.”

Hillary Clinton may have been unwise to say half of Donald Trump’s supporters are racists and other “deplorables.” But she wasn’t wrong.

If anything, when it comes to Trump’s racist support, she might have low-balled the number.
(. . .)
Research by Washington Post pollsters and by University of California at Irvine political scientist Michael Tesler, among others, have found that Trump does best among Americans who express racial animus. Evidence indicates fear that white people are losing ground was the single greatest predictor of support for Trump — more, even, than economic anxiety.

Few people embrace the “racist” label, so let’s help them. If you are “very enthusiastic” about a candidate who has based his campaign on scapegoating immigrants, Latinos and African Americans, talked of banning Muslims from the country, hesitated to disown the Ku Klux Klan and employed anti-Semitic imagery — well, you might be a racist. But if you are holding your nose and supporting Trump only because you think him better than Clinton, that doesn’t put you in the basket.

Personally, I have absolutely no problem with the notion that not only Trump himself, but also his surrogates and his supporters along with the entire of the Republican Party have been, for literally decades, burdened by racism, by bigotry, and by irrational phobias based on virtually any “non-white or non-Christian” headline popping up anywhere in the country. Or beyond, for that matter. And while it may be true that not all Republican candidates share each and all the listed “deplorable” fears, the fact remains that for Republicans, that’s where the votes are, and right ‘over there’ stands that giant herd of cows demanding to be milked. The result is that racists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes, islamophobes, religious zealots, immigrant haters and Border Wall advocates will each and all congregate with the political voice that responds to any one or all of those biases, those fears, those phobias.

And that, sadly, is the best description of Donald Trump I can come up with. He’s the one who, via his campaign performances, has discovered the means of milking those cows — that basket of deplorables. . . those racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobicvoters out there — all those people like that. And he has lifted them up.

“Deplorable” is clearly the operative word, the word that best describes the Trump campaign AND the Republican Party which backs and supports it/him.

“I understand that he has an Islamic girlfriend that is his fiancée and that this has changed him, has taken on some different political views along the way, this is activism that is sympathetic to ISIS.”

There it is. Racism, bigotry, xenophobia, and Islamophobiaall wrapped up in the attitude of a single Republican Congressman, a Tea Party Trump supporter.

25 thoughts on “The Watering Hole; Thursday September 15 2016; That “Basket of Deplorables”: Take A Closer Look”

She also trashed voters for being concerned about the cost of the Iraq war, when they should have been concerned about their own personal finances.

“If [voters] say, ‘Gee, we’re having a problem in this country economically because of the cost of the war, not because I live like a pig off my credit cards’ — which most people won’t admit in this country — then, I think, it’s a whole new problem for some of the candidates, particularly on the Republican side,” she said.

Q: Is it really true that ALL Republicans are ‘deplorable’? Is there evidence to the contrary Somewhere? Anywhere?

Amen. And Republicans do like war; there’s money in it for their corporate buddies, hence for themselves. Also of course, if you’re a Republican Senator or Rep. or even President (Dubya?), you can do war without risk of getting shot, and still milk the money cow. And make Amurkkka great again in the process.

People on the right expect us, no, they DEMAND of us, that we accept their framework for the debate, and that we accept their terminology and their definitions. The problem is that they expect us to accept their premises as valid when they clearly are not.

Iraq never posed a threat to us, existential or otherwise. Did Iraq support terrorism? Yes, absolutely! Saddam offered money to the families of suicide bombers – em>in Israel! Nobody ever seriously considered that we would have the same problem of bombs going off in the streets of New York every other week. We were never in the kind of danger the Bush admin told us we were. But they had to tell us we were in so much danger because otherwise they wouldn’t have an acceptable excuse to invade Iraq and claim the oil, which was the original plan all along. (See PNAC.)

Republicans and Conservatives claimed we didn’t support our country because we didn’t accept their framework of the discussion. The fact of the matter is it is THEY who didn’t support our country by lying us into an unnecessary war. Two, even, as a military response in Afghanistan to the attacks of 9/11 were not justifiable.

My hometown, Springfield, Ohio. One time (way back when) it was on the cover of Newsweek (and a special edition) as the typical American town.

It still may be typical, I don’t know.

I’m nostalgic about my home town, but I haven’t lived there in 30 years. (Haven’t even lived in Ohio for 25 years now.) I actually know some of the people in this article, or at least I used to know them. Have lost contact over the many years; or were just acquaintances.

Leaving was good for me, as it was a town that pulled me more to the right. I prefer the left, and I prefer living in a Blue State.

Springfield, Ohio — This is a town of overgrown lots, of boarded-up homes, of vacant businesses. It is a town where the remaining sections of the mammoth Crowell-Collier publishing plant loom, a brick-and-concrete monument to a thriving city that once was but increasingly is no more.

In calling Trump supporters ‘the deplorables’ we fall into the narrative of The Oligarchy. This is the “us versus them” dichotomy that keeps the lower classes fighting amongst themselves instead of uniting to address the issue of the unsustainable gathering of wealth and power into the hands of the very, very few.

Reject the Oligarchy’s narrative. Do not resort to name-calling, even though others may call you names.

I understand what you’re saying, but the ones we call “The Deplorables” actually support the Oligarchs because they, somehow, believe they’ll be rich one day, too. Also, the rich pricks who support Trump are, themselves, Deplorables. Not all super rich people are bad (Gates, Bloomberg), but the kind who would support a Trump presidency definitely are. (Kochs.)

One should also remember that the only ways to reach rightwhiners are to shock them and/or make them mad enough that their programming breaks down. It can be unpleasant and even dangerous duty but there are still hearts and minds that can be won. I, for one, am willing to set aside my usual calm and polite demeanor if I think I can actually win a round.

That works with moderates and people who only follow politics in a casual way but, IME, it’s useless with true believers. And, personally, I’m sick and tired of reaching out my hand only to have it slapped away or bitten off. Actually, once I recognize said true believers, I just try to ignore them and walk away to find a winnable battle.

I am these people. But for accidents of education and destiny, we come from the same place, we speak the same language, we eat the same food. I cannot reach the true believers. While I may sort of diss them when I have an opportunity to vent on this anonymous forum, I do not hate them, find them deplorable, or minimize our common humanity. I just cannot reach them. We inhabit separate realities. I will continue to take them to task when I feel they are denying the common humanity of others, but i cannot manage to deplore them as people, no mater how much I deplore their ideas.

Thank you for that — it’s IDEAS that are deplorable, not most of the people who hold them. Ideas and actions which disallow to others the same alleged “freedoms” and “rights” which those ‘freedoms’ are alleged to allow a given group to exercise — that’s the deplorable part, not the people themselves (with some exceptions, of course — see David Duke e.g.). Essentially it’s the divisive right wing (political and religious) philosophies that are despicable, not necessarily the people that hold them (although the practice of such philosophies can often become the first step on the path to human deplorability — e.g. Adolf Hitler).

Wayne, if the Oligarchy is to be overthrown, the lower classes must unite – we must find some common ground while acknowledging differences. Name calling, even if well deserved, does not foster a common goal.

I think the last time the lower classes were united against the Oligarchs was in the early 1900’s labor movement. It’s time to reunite.

Wayne, fortunately religious zealots on both ends of the spectrum are comparatively few in number. A self-described “true believer” lives in an reality that does not exist outside of their belief-system. In such a case, common ground may well not exist.

However, attaching derogatory labels to such people – putting such people down – is counter-productive.

There was once a sporting event wherein several teams competed against each other. One team roundly booed every other team as they were introduced. Another cheered for every other team. Which team garnered more respect from the crowd? The team that cheered won the hearts of the crowd. The team that booed found little support in the stands, and complained bitterly that the crowd was against them.

I can’t really argue with your basic premise. OTOH, I’ve never been one to sit back and accept/allow deeply embedded hate and fear — irrational phobias — to define MY world. Someone else’s world? OK, so long as it’s their world and NOT mine.

So what do we do when that phobia disease that defines THEIR world starts to leak into our own world? Ignore it and hope it goes away? Or call a spade a spade in whichever forum happens to be available? Personally, I find both Phobiacs (new word, but I like it!) AND Oligarchs to be deplorable, and I’ve never hesitated to say it out loud. Too bad doing so hasn’t forged a movement to change the the way the masses think, but I guess I’m not the first to fall off that particular ladder.

Oh well. Problem is, at my age relocating to somewhere that’s still decent — Norway maybe, Sweden? Scotland? An island in the south seas? — is at LEAST unlikely, but maybe if I can really piss off Trump and his companion oligarchs enough, then if he gets elected, they’ll pay my way outta here?

Prolly not. So what the hell. In this life I’ll shout them down, call them (descriptive!) names even, and then in the next life I’ll chew out my ancestrals for coming here in the first place.

Then I’ll sit back and watch as the oligarchs bring on the sixth mass extinction, and I’ll celebrate the fact that finally, all the phobiacs are gone for good — along with the oligarchs.

Cornwall in the U.K. It’s the southernmost county with miles of coastal walking paths, lovely villages, and, since its where the fiber optic cable from North America there’s low cost high speed internet! I prefer the little port towns like Port Issac, the place where the TV show “Doc Martin” is made, for the fresh seafood and a view of the ocean to remind me of my Navy days!

Yeah, that could work. I like villages, walking paths, oceans etc. And since I do already speak at least a little English I assume I could still learn the rest of it even at my age? If there are no deplorables there I could maybe fit right it!